Manipuri has its own script, locally known as Meitei Mayek. Manipur state and its surround are the locus from which the Tibeto-Burman family spread and diversified, making the genetic assignment of the region’s languages very difficult. During the 19th and 20th centuries, different linguists conjectured that Manipuri belonged to one of several TB subdivisions. In the early 21st century the consensus view placed Manipuri in its own subdivision of the so-called Kamarupan group—a geographic rather than a genetic designation but one that must suffice until more definitive information becomes available.

Nonetheless, Manipuri clearly has the genetic features of the Tibeto-Burman group. These include three positional occurrences of the velar nasals, widespread stem homophony, semantic bleaching of verbs, duplication or elaboration, final particles, the predominance of aspect rather than tense, a lack of gender marking verb–final word order, and agglutinative verb morphology, with extensive suffixation and more limited prefixation.

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...and adjacent Myanmar resemble Kachin; Nung (including Rawang and Trung) in Kachin state in Myanmar and in Yunnan province, China, has similarities with Kachin; and Mikir in Assam, as well as Mru and Meitei (Meetei) in India, Bangladesh, and Myanmar, seem close to Kukish.

...these tribes speak languages of the Tibeto-Burman family and practice traditional animist religions. Some of the Nagas have been converted to Christianity. More than three-fifths of the people speak Manipuri, which, along with English, is the official language of the state. Manipur’s population is largely rural, Imphal being the only city of any size.

language group within the Sino-Tibetan family. In the early 21st century, Tibeto-Burman languages were spoken by approximately 57 million people; countries that had more than 1 million Tibeto-Burman speakers included Myanmar (Burma; about 29 million), China (some 17.2 million), India (about 5.5...